This is a good week to read books that make you feel uncomfortable. Actually, any week is, but given the latest news about efforts to censor books and keep unsettling ideas out of the hands of school-age kids, this seems to be a particularly appropriate moment in history to engage in what in more rational days would be called “learning.” Tell that to the genius school board in Tennessee that is targeting Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust narrative, “Maus,” as subversive, pornographic and inappropriate for school libraries. Or to like-minded educational authorities in Texas whose purge of controversial textbook content has a chilling effect nationwide. That’s because publishers mindful of that lucrative market tend to target the lowest common denominator of tolerance about messy stories like the American genocide of indigenous peoples, the role of slavery in the making of our economy or the enduring legacy of Jim Crow and racism. In many states today, initiatives by educational administrators and legislative bodies are targeting the teaching of historical material that makes some students (read ”white students”) squirm. It’s the next logical step in the authoritarian censorship of ideas that have an edge. Having banned the teaching of a subject, Critical...Read more

It’s been a while since I’ve written – the end of Aug. 2021 was the last column. Not for lack of things to say, but work intervened. A colleague, Scott G. Nelson from Virginia Tech University, and I have been frantically polishing a manuscript we have been co-writing for the past year and a half, one in which we look back at the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic and what that foretells for the future of the country. The book, “Citizenship After Trump,” will be out in April under the publishing label of Routledge. Don’t blanch at the price of the hardcover; let’s just say we recommend the paperback and have already ordered copies. One of the difficult things in writing a non-fiction book like this about contemporary events is that you have to pace the tone so it is relevant and timely when it comes out, which is usually a year or two after you have been writing. When we began writing in the spring of 2020 the pandemic was in full force and we were all more or less locked down, getting used to Zoom meetings and teaching and venturing out only timidly. By the beginning of...Read more